Oops. Yes, well, hello there. Hmm. Haven’t I already said that?

Sorry for the lack of pertinent icon. I am assured by ‘im indoors that it’s on the to do list. Along with everything else. So don’t hold your breath!

Tara fer noo,

Nanny

Criminy, it’s bin a lang time since me owd goat said owt on ere (said she, in an appalling mix of accents). It’s been an interesting year and not worth trying to explain it all – if you’re reading this, you probably know most of it anyway. Suffice to say, we have handed in our full application to NZ Immigration and are waiting to hear who our case officer is; we’ve all given up work/childminder (delete as appropriate); and (assuming all goes well with the flat sale) we should be moving from London to Liverpool by the end of this month, with the eventual aim of leaving the UK in early Feb.

We’ve spent the last day or so figuring out everything we have to do over the next 21 days. The general feeling is AAARRRRGGGGHHHHH! Or some such. Panic? Who, me??

Actually, no; or rather, not too much. We have many people ready and willing to help. A combination of t’inlaws, best man and NCT chum turned life organiser to the rich (and us…) is a rather hefty conglomeration of skills. And that’s just fer starters.

I would be very surprised if I get to say anything more here until we’re in Scouseland – but hey, we are occasional goats.

Oh, and I haven’t blogged since our honeymoon 3 and a half years ago, so apologies if this isn’t especially well written. One thing I think I can safely promise, to those of you who remember said blog, is that there will be less gourmandising this time round. Well, until we hit the land of milk and honey (and sheep and lambs).

I wish we were there now!!!

Once again, not a haiku. Where have all the haiku gone? And nothing to do with NZ either. More on that to come. But for now, today’s wee musing:

Putty Moor (Upon the Heath)
with kind thanks to Tony P for the addition of an R

I took my love to Putty Moor
(I had not taken her before).
Alas! We came a little sore;
We lay upon the Heath.

Friend, if you moot to take yours there
Attend this treatise, sore I share,
To boot: Protection! – for your care
… (Tarpaulin, underneath.)

Had a fascinating 7 mile walk round south London yesterday, via two innovative eco-houses, the Tree House, a modern self-build timber-frame solar-powered house built on a scrap of land in Clapham, and 3 Acorns Retro Eco-House, which claims to be the only retro zero-carbon home in London (featuring solar hot water, solar electric, domestic wind-turbine, wood-burner and rain-harvester). Inspirational stuff.

The Occasional Kid found it pretty exciting too, spending most of the day riding round on Daddy’s back, cat spotting and announcing, “Poo! Poo! Clean nappy!” to passing strangers. (Spuriously it turned out; must tell her that story about the little boy and the wolf…)

One of the things that had been potentially concerning us about moving to NZ was the cultural shift from losing access to UK television (particularly the BBC and some of the sport). Now it does seem with the advent of the BBC media player (still pending for the Mac) etc that things wouldn’t be quite as scary as we’d feared, and many UK shows and sporting events do make it into NZ schedules, although riddled with commercial breaks. But just to be on the safe side we’ve decided to roadtest a Slingbox.

If you’ve not encountered Slingboxes before they’re – er – boxes and they – well – sling telly over the t’Interweb to a computer or 3G phone somewhere else in the world.

By hooking up a second Sky+ box at my parents house in Liverpool, and plugging this into the Slingbox, and plugging the Slingbox into my parents’ router, we can now watch or even remotely record anything we could see on UK satellite via the net. OK, we’re in London at the moment, so we could have just got our own dish, but if it works here it should work anywhere we can get a broadband connection. It’s pretty cool.

It’s even cooler watching on the 3G phone, although the picture is both teeny and weeny.

The only drawback I’ve found with it so far is that it’s very dependent on the available upwards bandwidth at the Slingbox end of the link, and most asymmetric broadband connections are very asymmetric, which means that a standard account with a very fast downwards connection is still relatively sluggish in the other direction. Which means we’re probably going to have to upgrade my parents’ account to get enough bandwidth for a good quality picture.

In the meantime, I’m watching the Liverpool/Chelsea match right now, and although the picture’s a bit ill defined I can see the ball and there are very few picture freezes or sound dropouts. So I’m pretty impressed.

We’re starting to put together an achievable timeline for a move to NZ if we’re successful in our application. There’s a lot we’d like to do in the UK and Europe before we go – not least my parents’ ruby wedding next summer – so we’re currently aiming towards a move in September 2008. Working backwards from then, given the processing time for Expressions of Interest and visas, it looks like the earliest we can submit the EOI is mid-September this year – in about a month’s time.

Hah! I just dug this up. I wrote it for an Internet awareness training course in 2002. I’ve just made a couple of minor amendments, but I think it’s probably good enough to share:

The Internet Song
(to the tune of Monty Python’s Galaxy Song)
(with apologies to Eric Idle)

If the Net in which you’re fishin’
isn’t doing what you’re wishin’,
If all your Google searches come back “Null”
If the page you’ve hunted for
says “File not found” and “404”,
If you tend to find statistics rather dull…

Just remember that it started
when the Sputnik first departed
on its orbit back in 1957
The American Defense Department
thought it would make sense
to defend against this Soviet threat in heaven
So a thinktank – codenamed ARPA –
was established with this charter
and in ‘69 the ARPANET began
with just four computer hosts
the net linked up the US coasts
just as Armstrong made his “one small step for Man”

In the Seventies it grew
and by 1982 they were calling it “The Internet” instead
It grew to twenty-five thousand times its size by 1989
- the year Tim Berners-Lee devised the World Wide Web
And by Christmas ‘93 – Blobby Blobby Blobby Blobby –
60 countries were connected to the Net:
Cameroon, Tunisia, Estonia,
Thailand, Chile, Taiwan, India,
Israel, Mexico, Korea and Kuwait.

50 new sites every day
First cybercafe in UK,
and then everyone gets Windows 95
It’s bundled with IE – although it’s only Version 3 –
but now Netscape finds it harder to survive.
The press say “Browser War”, and sales of modems soar
- now there’s 20 million people on the Net
browsing 3.6 million web pages (now that’s going to take you ages
- how much bigger can these crazy figures get?)

2.7 trillion emails sent in 1997
30 priests appear on “Catholic Priests Online”
There’s 186 thousand miles of undersea telephone cables
by the time Somalia gets hooked up in 1999
7 billion mails each day – and that’s just the USA –
China’s netizens quadruple in two years
The Millennium Bug’s OK but things don’t go the DotComs’ way
- the bubble bursts; the millionnaires all hit the beers.

Now we’re digitally divided – it’s a fact; you just can’t hide it
More than half the surfers still live in the States:
80 million and still rising,
and it’s really not surprising that the Third World pays to surf at higher rates
But technology’s progressing, so don’t find it too depressing
if you’re feeling overprivileged to surf,
though you might want to remember on eleventh of September
it could still be here when no-one’s left on Earth…

In the absence of the Guardian topical haiku competition I thought I’d try something a bit different but similarly challenging. The BBC are currently running a competition to summarise the first six Harry Potter books in 100 words or less. Here’s my stab at it, submitted this evening as Christopher Graeme. It comes in at 99 words, which is pretty tight. (Thanks to The Occasional Nanny Goat for the idea of doing it in verse.) 

Orphaned Harry’s magic, Voldemort his murderous foe.
Dumbledore, school Head – an ally, sadly had to go.

Voldemort’s and Harry’s fates entwined have been since birth:
Prophecy dictates that one, or both, must leave the earth.

Hogwart’s School of Wizardry plays backdrop to this war;
Professor Snape is bad. Or good. Or bad. (We’re still not sure.)

Best friend Ron is ginger and Hermione is clever.
Sirius (the godfather) is lost, we think, forever.

Harry rides a broomstick to play Quidditch (wizard polo).
Herm and Ron are getting on (and off?) but Harry’s solo.

“Enough!” we cry…
Will Harry – DIE?!

Hahaha! Ever flick through a dictionary looking for rude words? Saddo. (Yeah, me too.) Well flick no more, for in the Age of T’InterWeb Wiktionary has a special category just for you!

All together now: “Isn’t the Internet WONDERFUL!?”

Spinal Tap reformed for the Live Earth concert in London on Saturday afternoon. It was only on the tube on the way home from Wembley that I realised the wrist band I’d been given when I went through the gate had “Pitch” printed on it… I’d been sitting very comfortably in the stand all day when I could have been writhing amongst the crowd during THIS:

(Thanks for putting that up Handy Andy.)

Ah well. It was a great day out, and hopefully raised some awareness, despite all the po-faced media whinging about the negative environmental impact of the concerts themselves. It was notable that the beer and toilet queues were much longer during the green bits than when the bands were playing (not that I’m saying that everyone was there for the spectacle not The Cause or anything). It was also disappointing that there was so much plastic being used – for beer cups, coffee stirrers, fish-and-chips forks – when there are cardboard and sustainable wooden alternatives available. Come on Wembley, get your act together.